"The mighty Achilles, slayer of Hector, and hero of the Trojan War was himself destroyed by his one vulnerability."

-Homer

"O Minerva, goddess of arms and chivalry, who by virtue of understanding far surpassing other women discovered and established the use of forging iron and steel among other noble arts....Adored Lady and High Goddess,....

(Invocation to Minerva)

"I have examined man ' s wonderful inventions. And I tell you in the arts of life, man invents nothing: but :in the arts of death he outdoes nature herself. . .There is nothing in man's industrial machinery but his greed and his sloth: his heart is in his weapons."

George Bernard Shaw

"Attacked by a terrible stream of 

consuming fire, her flesh fell from her

bones, like resin from a pine-torch,

a sight dreadful to behold."

-Euripides, Medea, 431 BC

My feelings are with Roland de Roncevaux-"Cursed be the coward who invented arms capable of killing ,at a distance. "

"In 1755, a French engineer named Du Penon, presented the young Louis XVI with a military 'organ' which, when a lever was pulled, discharged twenty-four bullets simultaneously. A memoir was attached to this instrument, the forerunner of the modern machinegun. The weapon was considered by the King and his ministers,Malesherbes and Turgot, to be so deadly that the offer was refused, and the inventor was deemed to be an enemy of humanity. "

Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier

The Morning of the Magicians

   "Scythian archers' accuracy and range were phenomenal, even on horseback. Archaeologists have discovered skulls of their victims with arrowheads embedded right between the eyes. Pliny wrote that these nomads were so skilled that they actually used their arrows to dislodge valuable green turquoise gems in the rocks of "inaccessible icy crags' of the Caucasus. From an ancient inscription at Olbia on the Black Sea, we know that a Scythian archer named Anaxagoras won a prize for long-distance shooting. His arrow traveled 1,640 feet (500 meters), far exceed the average range of an ancient Greek bow, estimated at 900 feet (250-300 meters)."

Adrienne Mayor

Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World

"The weapon, called a 'ravensbill' or a 'poleaxe' was sufficiently heavy to break into even the strongest armour. It is said that the skulls of a number of knights, killed with the very similar Swiss halberd, have been excavated and show that they really were split down to the teeth."

A History of War 'and Weapons

449-1660

A.V.B. Norman & Don Pottinger

"It was the rifle bullet, which had rendered the defense stronger than the attack : it begot the rifle-pit and the trench, it sheathed the bayonet, it blunted the sword, it drove back the cannon ,and it dismounted the horseman."

J.F.C. Fuller

WAR & TECHNOLOGY

"No profession is so wedded to tradition as the military. World War I had provided spectacular emphasis of this,. Lord Haig had scorned the machine gun as "a much overrated weapon," and Kitchener had called the tank a "toy." Marshal Joffre had refused to have a telephone installed in his headquarters. Submarines had been deplored as ungentlemanly; poison gas, adopted reluctantly by the English after the Germans had used it, had been delicately described as "the accessory." The trench mortar had been rejected twice at the British War Office and finally introduced by a cabinet minister who had begged the money for it from an Indian Mercenary. In the early stages of the war British subalterns had visited armorers to have their swords sharpened, like Henry V, before crossing to France, and as late as 1918 Pershing had cluttered up his supply lines with mountains of fodder for useless horses, still dreaming of Custer and Sheridan and the glint of Virginia moonlight on the shining saddles of Stuart's cavalry."

William Manchester

American Caesar

"Most of the world, distracted by the attention surrounding efforts to reach an accord in round two of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, remains unaware that what is potentially the deadliest and costliest arms race in history is rapidly building momentum. Quietly and relentlessly, the U.S. and the Soviet Union are rushing to develop sophisticated new weapons that will revolutionize the concept of modern warfare and turn outer space into another armed camp. The stakes could not be higher in this race, yet it has been untouched by public debate and is completely outside the purview of negotiations. Whoever gains control of space-the "high-ground" of future wars-could shift the balance of power so decisively as to equate with world domination. And so far, the U.S. trails the Soviet Union.

Business' week

June 4, 1979 -

"Mention one great battle that has brought about any decisive progress in the military art! Progress in all fields is not the fruit of struggle, competition, or even of discussion, but of the series of good ideas that have appeared in ingenious brains and have been appropriate to their time-of adaptation, and not of opposition."

Tarde

1843-1904

"There is something about technology that is insidious, debilitating and depressing. But the worse things technology does are so subtle that if one fulminates against it, one is in danger of always sounding hysterical." '

Norman Mailer

Totalitarianism lS the natural form, of government for technology. "

Norman Mailer

: U. S, News & World Report

"For it is a paradox that was war grows more mechanical the value of a pair of human hands mounts ever higher in strategic calculations."

Lynn Montross

War Through the Ages

"The vibrator was no larger than an alarm-clock, so constructed that frequency of vibrations could be altered at will. He set the vibrator And tune with the link. For a long time nothing happened- vibrations of link and machine did not chance to coincide, but at last they did and the great steel link began to tremble, increased its trembling until it dilated and contracted like a beating heart-and finally broke. Sledge hammers could not hare done it, but a fusillade of taps, no one of which would have harmed a baby, did it. Tesla was pleased. He had learned something. He wanted to learn more. He put his little vibrator in his coat-pocket and went out to hunt a half-erected building. Down in the Wall Street district, he found one-ten stories of steel framework without a brick or a stone laid around it. He clamped his vibrator to one of the beams, and fussed with the adjustment until he got it. Tesla said finally the structure began to creak and weave and the steel-workers came to the ground panic-stricken, believing that there had been an earthquake. Police were called out. Tesla put the vibrator in his pocket and went away. Ten minutes more and we could have laid the building in the street." 

A.L. Benson

"Nikola Tesla,

Dreamer," in The World Today,Feb 1912 ppl7G3

TECHNOLOGY

"The vibrations of the earth have a periodicity of approximately one hour and forty-nine minutes. That is to say, if I strike the earth this instant, a wave of contraction goes through it that will come back in one hour and forty-nine minutes in the form of expansion. . .The earth, like everything else, is in a constant state of vibration. . . .continually contracting and expanding. Now, suppose that at the precise moment when it begins to contract, I explode a ton of dynamite. That accelerates the contraction and, in one hour and forty-nine minutes, there comes an equally accelerated wave of expansion. . . .Suppose this performance to be repeated, time after time. Is there any doubt as to what would happen? There is no doubt in my mind. The earth would be split in two. For the first time in man's history he has the knowledge with which he may interfere with cosmic processes."

Nikola Tesla

"In a few weeks I could set the earth's crust into such a state of vibration that it would rise and fall hundreds of Feet, throwing rivers out of beds, wrecking buildings, and practically destroying civilizations. The principle cannot fail...There may be flaws in this theory. Others may see them I don't.

Nikola Tesla

A.L. Benson, "Nikola Tesla,Dreamer"

in The World Today ,Feb 1912 pp1763

"For years, common gossip had attributed a mysterious death ray to Tesla's inventive genius. Not to be overlooked in the headlines of the day, Little London claimed proud relationship to Nicola Tesla and his Colorado Springs discoveries which they had somehow overlooked at the time, but now claimed, "they knew him when-" On May 30,1924, a Colorado Springs paper carried on its first page a news article inspired by a New York report of the day before. The story told of the invention of an invisible ray, developed by Tesla,which was capable of stopping airplanes in mid-flight ,an invention which had come about through improvements on Tesla' s Colorado Springs discoveries. It was boasted that the ray had already been used to cause French airplanes to descend over Bavaria, and went on to state that the ray had been offered to the United States Government through an English engineer, J.H. Hammil, who represented a German scientist who had perfected the ray. It was mentioned that Tesla had offered to turn his death ray plans over to Geneva. On his seventy-eighth birthday, in 1934, another flurry of interest in Tesla's death ray hit the country. Again, an Associated Press dispatch picked up the reporter's story. Here, Tesla was quoted as saying that his ray was based on an entirely new principle of physics, He upped the figures, claiming that his beam mould destroy 10,000 planes at a distance of two-hundred and fifty miles. Although the beam was only one one-hundred-millionth centimeter, the inventor admitted that a two-million dollar plant would be required for its construction and the time necessary for its completion would be three months. Tesla stated that twelve such plants, located at strategic points, would constitute a veritable Chinese wall around the country, and could defend the United States against all foes. His beam, he claimed, could melt any engine, whether driven by diesel or gasoline or oil, and there was no possible defense against it. Tesla insisted that he could go to work at once, but that he would "tolerate no interference from experts." The ray was described as the most important of all Tesla's inventions so far; it was said that it could send concentrated beams of particles through free air, could cause armies of millions to drop dead in their tracks. It was stated that the beam would operate silently but effectively, as far as a telescope could see an object, or on the ground as the curvature of the earth would permit, and would leave no trace of what had caused destruction. The entire process was labeled, by Tesla, his "teleforce."

Lightning in His Hand

The Life Story of Nikola Tesla

By Inez Hunt & Wanetta W. Draper

OMNI

"There has been a great deal said about a 3,000 mile high-angle rocket....The people who have been writing these things that annoy me, have been talking about a 3,000 mile high-angle rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon which would land exactly on a certain target, such as a city.

   "I say, technically, I don't think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing, and I feel confident that it will not be done for a very long period of time to come....I think we can leave that out of our thinking. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking."

-Dr. Vannevar Bush (former Dean of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of technology and President of the Carnegie Institution of wash.) Dec 1945

MILITARY PLANNERS VIEW SHUTTLE AS MILESTONE IN SPACE WAR

"The shuttle gives us a strategic edge over the Soviet Union and their masses of missiles and submarines-While the Russians would say 'ain't it awful, ' I say 'hurray' and let' s take advantage of our superiority."

Lt. Gen. Daniel O.Graham

(N.Y. Times March 29,1981)

"The military use of the shuttle is going to be dominant, while civilian uses will be minor."---NASA is going to be trampled to death by the Defense Department on shuttle use, so why not be honest about it and call it a military program?

Dr. James Van Allen (Ibid)

" 'as the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather,

so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill."

Helen Keller

"I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes."

Winston Churchill

"

"War represents the epitome of the scientific-technological genius laboring in a meaningless universe, unrestrained by values or morals. Death and destruction, massive waste of resources irretrievable expenditure-these are technical objectives to which science and technology have lavishly applied themselves."

Eugene S. Schwartz

Overkill

"To prevent breakdown while fomenting continued exponential growth, the path of all technological societies must lie in the direction of rigid controls. Big economy requires big government which requires big science and big technology. Tendencies toward disorder and anarchy will be stamped out as being inimical to "progress" "Law and Order" becomes the shibboleth of technological society in design."

Eugene S. Schwartz

"We are the Romans of the modern world-the great assimilating people. Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff pointed 'gladius' of the Romans; and the American Bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society

"The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries. It was the Polish 'lance' that left Poland at last with nothing of her own to bound.

O.W. Holmes

 

 

"Over the last two decades, the U.S. has spent more than $50 billion on military space projects. . To date this money has gone for rather fragile hardware designed’ only to support missions on the ground, not to engage in actual combat. To develop satellites that can wage war and withstand its rigors, billions more-perhaps as much again as all the money spent to date-will be needed. The ultimate tab for a full-fledged space-war capability could be so high, in fact, that some Administration officials are anxious to avoid drawing public attention to the matter. They worry that a tax-weary public and a budget-conscious Congress would not allow spending of the enormous sums necessary without clear signs of an impending threat. "

Business Week June 4,1979

The New Military in Space

"The technological war remains the decisive war of the century. Few as yet realize that space war has become its most important theatre."

Jerry Pournelle

OMNI June 1983

"Over the course of the next century, the weather will be our most powerful weapon, So says Weather as a force multiplier: Owning the Weather …part of a 1996 Air Force-commissioned report forecasting the technology required to maintain US air and space leadership into the next century."

US Air Force research paper "Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025" tvuok.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/v3c15-1.htm

Historical Use of Biologic Arms

Mid-1300s: The Siege of Kaffa(now Feodossia in Ukraine) by ultimately conquering Tartars who catapulted cadavers infested with bubonic plague over city walls. Survivors of the siege carried infection to other parts of Europe, spawning the Black Death

1763: British Commander Sir Jeffrey Amherst deliberately orders giving blankets infested with small pox to tribes in French-Indian War

1917: Germans attack Romanian sheep and British mules and French horses with anthrax in World War I.

1932-1945: Japanese military kills 10,000 prisoners in Manchuria with anthrax, bubonic plague, and cholera experiments, and another 10,000 in attacks on Chinese cities with those agents in 1941

1944: Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps deliberately are infected with hepatitis A virus and rickettsia strains to test military vaccines

19655-75: Viet Cong set fall-through trail traps with feces-covered sticks at bottom

1984: Rajineeshee sect pulls off domestic terrorism initiative with deliberate salmonella contamination of four Oregon salad bars, resulting in 751 falling ill.

1995: Michigan Patriots militia members try to kill four federal agents with ricin, a lethal substance derived from easy-to-grow castor beans.

1995: The Aum Shrinkyo sect abandons a bio-warfare program featuring anthrax and botulism in favor of lethal sarin chemical agent, released on a Tokyo subway. Twelve died and 5,500 injured.

(from Gannett News service)

See : Toxic Shock….Saddam’s sickening arsenal by Franklin Foer…The New Republic, Mar 16,1998

"….Since the defection of Vladimir Pasechnik in 1989 to MI6, the British and American had learned the extent of Russia’s BW work. Pasechnik was a key scientist involved in what was perhaps the best kept secret of the Cold War; a covert program employing more than 15,000 people, code-named Biopreparat, that was ostensibly making harmless vaccines but which was, in fact, developing some of the most deadly weapons ever known. Among the weapons that have been developed are fourteen variants on the Tularemia plague virus for which there is no known antidote in the west…..

James Adams

The Next World war

"That staple of science fiction, the combat robot, finally showed up in the second half of the twentieth century. But this most radical development in twentieth-century warfare went largely unnoticed.

   For example, over a thousand computer-guided cruise missiles were used in the 1990s. These are high-tech weapons. The missiles are one-ton aircraft that can find their way over hundreds of miles of land or sea, and then hit a target the size of a small barn. No pilot needed; onboard computers take care of all the decision making. The ultimate killer droid.

   But these missiles are nothing new in this century. In the 1940s, the Germans fired some 9,000 V-1 cruise missiles at Britain. The V-1 was primitive, but it was the ancestor of today's cruise missiles. Some 5000 V-1s managed to hit London.

A few months later, the V-2 ballistic missiles appeared. These used a complex guidance system to come down on a distant target. More than 4,000 were launched, and unlike the V-1, they could not be shot down. In the 1980s, some 600 Russian Scud missiles, based on the V-2 design, were fired during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq used about 70 Scuds during its 1990-92 war, and thousands of Scuds are still available for use.

   descendants of the V-1 and V-2 have become combat robots, and these droids are the unknown weapon of the twentieth century. More battlefield robots are showing up each year.

   Starting with mines and torpedoes at the turn of the century, World War II saw technology moving ahead swiftly. By 1945, there were torpedoes that could follow a ship's noise. Naval mines could detect ships using magnetism (all that steel) or pressure (all that weight in the water). The air war saw the introduction of many new electronic weapons that would soon turn into missiles that could think for themselves.

   After World War II, missiles became smarter every year. The goal was "fire and forget" missiles, and these have been a reality for decades. When microcomputers became available in the 1970s, robotic weapons suddenly became really, really smart.

   Now there are antitank weapons (the WAM-wide area munitions-system) that listen for sounds and ground vibrations that indicate a particular type of vehicle. Then a coffee-can-size weapon is fired more than 300 feet into the air. On board are radar, a heat sensor, a computer, and a warhead that will punch through the top armor of any armored vehicle detected.

   The robots will not replace all human soldiers anytime soon. People are smarter and more adaptable. But the droids are relentless and fearless. The robots work, they're cheap, they've been here for most of the century, and more are on the way. Year by year, the battlefield has more droids and fewer people on it.

Warfare will never be the same.

James F. Dunnigan

Dirty Little Secrets of the Twentieth Century

   "Duke Nukem runs forward, grabs the shotgun and pumps a round into the chamber. "Groovy," intones the video-game hero in his gravelly voice, just before he starts blasting alien scum into a bloody pulp. 

   Sound violent? Not so some video-game developers, apparently Major U.S. software companies are about to make such infamous "splatter" games as Duke Nukem and Doom seem like child's play as they prepare to release a new wave of titles this fall that enable players to manipulate photo realistic images of humans into acts of torture, mutilation and even-if you can believe it-prostititution. 

   Interplay Productions proudly promotes its Wild 9 as the first ever action game that encourages players to torture enemies. Shiny Entertainment, a subsidiary of Interplay, is completing work on Messiah, a game in which a cherub tries to cleans the world of corruption. "Ever seen a body with 10,000 volts run through it?" the game's advertising slogan teases. "Want to?"

   Not to be outdone, Virgin Interactive is set to release Thrill Kill, a series of gladiator-style battles between demented characters that bite and tear at each other in a torture-chamber setting.

   And Max Payne, a vigilante-style game (whose hero is not-so-subtly named after the "maximum pain" he likes to inflict on his victims), is coming soon from 3D Realms and Remedy Entertainment. The game recently inspired editors of PC Gamer Magazine to exclaim: "While Duke Nukem raised a few eyebrows with his testosterone-charged quips, alien bashing violence and girl-happy lifestyle, Max Payne's vendetta-fueled exploits and shocking amount of violence are likely to have the senators squealing."

   Other pain-packing titles due out in the next year include Deathtrap Dungeon and Dungeon Keeper Ii (which, according to Computer Gaming World Magazine, "offers improved graphics, more creatures and better ways to torture")

   What is also striking about such games is that they are being released by large, well-established companies. Interplay, for example, is one of the larges U.S.-based entertainment-software publishers, with sales in the past six months of $81-million. And Virgin Interactive is the software arm of Richard Branson's multibillion-dollar British media conglomerate.

   But then, the stakes are high. Since video-gaming giant GT Interactive Software acquired Duke Nukem from creator Formgen in 1996, the company has sold more than four million copies globally. Those sales have helped solidify GT Interactive's position as the second largest entertainment-software publisher in the United States, after Electronic Arts, with annual revenue of $531 million. In total, the U.S. gaming market was worth $1.3 billion in 1997, according to market-research firm PC DAta. Globally, the figure is $17 billion.

   While game developers say the violence is aimed purely at adults, others point out there are few safeguards to prevent the software from falling into the hands of children. Stephen Kline, a professor of communications at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, who has taught courses on video-gaming culture, recently released a study that concludes parents tend to pay no attention to what their kids play. And, according to Kline's survey of 650 youth, video games-whether computer-based CD-ROM's or Nintendo, Sony or Sega console games-help shape children's outlook on the world. 

   "Heavy gamers show different kinds of judgments than light gamers, " Kline said in an interview. "Female gamers especially-and there are some-show the classic desensitization effect. They rate things like blood and guts, rape and sexual aggression as less offensive, as less violent, than the light and moderate gamers."

   Kline's study states that roughly one in four children is addicted to gaming (specifically, 24 percent play between seven and 30 hours a week).

   That's not all. In this new world of gaming, where there's violence there often is sex. Fallout 2 soon-to-be-released game set in a photonuclear holocaust era, features the chance to "fall in love, get married and pimp your spouse for a little extra chump change. Hey it's a dark and dangerous world." Prostitution also features prominently in the aforementioned Messiah, whose characters include several scantily clad hookers..."

Charles Mandel....The Globe and Mail (Toronto) (1998)

   "According to several independent sources, Lev Sandakhchiev was in charge of a research group at Vector in 1990 that devised a more efficient way to mass-produce warhead-grade smallpox in industrial-scale pharmaceutical tanks. In 1994-three years after the British and American bioweapons inspectors toured Vector and were told by Sandakhchiev that there was no smallpox there-his people built a prototype smallpox bioreactor and allegedly tested it with variola major. The reactor is a three-hundred-gallon tank that looks something like a hot-water heater with a maze of pipes around it. It sits on four stubby legs inside a Level 4 hot zone in the middle of Corpus 6, on the third floor of the building. The reactor was filled with plastic beads on which live kidney cells from African green monkeys were growing. Vector scientists would pump the reactor full of cell-nutrient fluid and a little bit of smallpox. The reactor ran at the temperature of blood. In a few days, variola would spread through the kidneys cells, and the bioreactor would become extremely hot with amplified variola, whereupon the liquid inside the reactor could be drawn off in pipes and frozen. In biological terms, the liquid was hot enough to have global implications. A single run of the reactor would have produced approximately one hundred trillion lethal doses of variola major-enough smallpox to give each person on the planet around two thousand infective doses of smallpox. Vecor scientists steadfastly maintain, however, that they no experiments with smallpox until 1997."

Richard Preston

The Demon In The Freezer

"There is no question in my mind tht the Iraqis have seed stocks of smallpox," Spertzel said to me.

"Why do you think that?"

?In a nutshell, the Iraqis formally acknowledged to us that they were acquiring weapons of mass destruction by 1974," he said. By then, Spertzel explained, the Iraqis had already built a pair of Biosafety Level 3 lab complexes at a base called Salman Pak, which covers a peninsula that sticks out in a bend of the Tigris River. Salman Pak was run by the Iraqi security service. They had what they called an "anti-terrorist training camp" there. "It would have taken a while to build these biocontainment labs at Salman Pak, so we think their biowarfare program dates back to 1973 or earlier.....

Richard Preston

The Demon in the Freezer

   "He had thanked me for the smoked salmon that day, "It's really large," he remarked. "I wonder: is it one of the newer genetically engineered salmon? It's fairly simple to add one gene to a salmon. Or to any organism in the lab. Will people change organisms in the lab to make them more dangerous? Can it be done? Yeah. Will it be done? Yeah, it will be done," he said. "And there will be unexpected crises."

Richard Preston

The Demon in the Freezer

Book: "Lifting the Digital Fog" by Admiral Bill Owens

Book: "Soul of the Sword: An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare from Prehistory to the Present" by Robert L. O'Connell

Book: "The Story of the Gun" by Ian V. Hogg

Book: "Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics-The History of the Explosive that Changed the World" by Jack Kelly

Book: "Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World" by Jack Kelly

Book: "Machine Gun: The Story of the Men and the Weapon That Changed the Face of War" by Anthony Smith

Book: "Malice Aforethought: The History of Booby Traps from World War One to Vietnam" by Ian Jones

Book: "Battle: A History of Combat and Culture" by John A. Lynn

Book: "Weapons: An International Encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to 2000 A.D. by the Diagram Group

Book: "Friendly Fire" by Scott A. Snook

Book: "Smart Weapons: Top Secret History of Remote Controlled Airborne Weapons" by H. McDaid & D. Oliver

Book: "Dragonfly: The Luftwaffe's Experimental Trieblugeljager Project" by David Myhra

Book: "Technology and War: from 2000 B.C. to the Present" By Martin Van Creveld

Book: "Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First Century Warfare" by John B. Alexander

Book: "The Invention that Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution" by Robert Buderi

Book: "Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond" by Michael Ignatieff

Book: "BioHazard" by Ken Alibek

Book: "Lb 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory" by Michael Christopher Carroll

Book: "The Hunt For Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology" by Nick Cook

Book: Smart Weapons: Top Secret History of Remote Controlled Airborne Weapons" by H. McDaid & D. Oliver